Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Eldritch: Layline 022

I think almost every artist at one point has been told what ‘real’ artists do… Thankfully, most of rebel and do whatever the hell we please anyway.Anywho, this page got me to thinking about my old painting classmates.Most of us had online galleries of one kind or another, but none of us watched one another, because our interests are so divergent.I wonder how they’re doing now.I suppose someday I’ll bump into some of them again and find out.

However, about this page… there’s not a whole lot of mythology in this one for me to ramble about.So, I’ll ramble about something else: Music

I have a lot of what I consider to be werewolf music.I tend to buy single songs from Amazon, just because they’re werewolfy. Anyway, someone recently popped a note my direction, asking what music I listen to when I work on Eldritch.The truth is, I usually listen to NatGeo.However, there are two songs that get me going when I have trouble getting inspired for this comic.

The first of which is Type O Negative’s Wolf Moon. This is tied with a few others (which I will list in a later posting) as my favorite werewolf song. I know, I know what some of the lyrics are about, and I don’t really care.To be perfectly honest, half of the lyrics I couldn’t make out until after I looked them up anyway.So, I have a lot of “Misheard lyrics” that I hear instead of the canon ones anyway. But lyrics like: “Hey wolf moon, Come cast your spell on me” really catch my attention, since, there really is a wolf moon (the January moon) and one of the ways to become a werewolf in old times was to sleep under a full moon, sometimes in a particular season, or on a particular Friday.But mythology aside… The tone color of the music… oh stars, I love it.The smooth, almost chanting quality of the voices juxtaposed against the raw electric guitar makes for a nice auditory duality I feel mimics the nature of a werewolf… and a little after five minutes into the song, there’s this point where it really takes off and I just adore it.

However, when working on the comic, there’s another song that I not only consider to be a werewolf song, but I also regard as Faith’s theme at this point in the story:Changes, by 3 Doors down.I know it doesn’t say anything about wolves or lycanthropy, but to me, this is SO a werewolf song.“I try to hold this Under control --They can't help me 'Cause no one knows”Is just such a werewolfy lyric to me, especially when juxtaposed with the rest of the lyrics. It’s very vague, but the song basically describes someone who’s going through a lot of changes, who’s scared about what’s happening, something that can’t be controlled, something that they can’t tell others about, and it is tearing them apart.Sounds like lycanthropy to me!